Cute and Cuddly

In the last post, I wasn’t kind to the snapping turtle for its non-cute and cuddly attributes. So this time, let’s go for the C&C Cottontail Rabbit. (Click on the picture to fully appreciate this guy.)

In my frequent trips to the Celery Farm Natural Area, usually in search of weeds and bugs to photograph, this guy or one of his buddies nearly always greets me somewhere along the meadow or pond trail. Usually, I have the wrong lens on my camera—a macro lens suited for flower and bug photography. But today, I had switched to a big howitzer, because one of the flowers to be photographed was about ten feet into a poison ivy patch.

On my hike back to the car, the “Meadow Supervisor,” as I call him, confronted me on the path and posed without even a nose twitch for a few portraits.

The cottontail is everything the snapper isn’t—furry instead of scaly, land-loving instead of aquatic (except for laying eggs), herbivorous instead of carnivorous (mostly), and cute instead of, well, handsome, in a reptilian sort of way.

The main occupation of cottontails (besides greeting visitors) is grazing on almost any plants they find tasty—all day long. It’s a relaxed sort of existence except for watching out for predators, of which there are many candidates in the Celery Farm—hawks, fox, coyotes (?). The snappers, meanwhile, are cruising the pond, snapping up fish, ducklings and most anything that moves.

A surprising finding, however, is that a stomach content analysis of snapping turtles reveals up to fifty percent plant material, a reminder that before the sad events of Genesis 3, everybody ate plant material exclusively. Predation was not a factor and there was no scavenging because there were no dead things to scavenge. It wasn’t until after the Flood that God permitted people to eat meat (Gen 9:3), probably because the Curse and subsequent degradation of soil and plant nutritional content would have made an exclusively vegetarian diet increasingly insufficient.

How we got from bunnies to Biblical truth may have been confusing—but that’s what we do here (both heading for Biblical truth and trying to confuse :-)

If you don’t understand Genesis 3, you don’t really understand anything.